(00:00:10) And good afternoon. Welcome back to midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary eichten as a Child author Margaret Atwood read everything she could get her hands on cookbook science fiction novels magazines advertisements even the back of cereal boxes. But Atwood says reading isn't all that influenced her writing and she discussed some of those influences in a visit to the Twin Cities last fall. Where's Margaret Atwood is probably Canada's best-known literary experts. She's written more than 25 books including the handmaid's tale Alias Grace and the edible woman her latest novel called The Blind assassin when Britain's highest literary honor the booker prize at what it was in the Twin Cities to talk about her career at the library Foundation of Hennepin County's pen pal lecture series broadcast of the pen pals lecture series is supported by the bookcase on Lake Street in Wayzata announcing a book signing, February 8th at 7. M with Ella In Bloom author Shelby Heron online at bookcase of Wayzata.com here now is writer poet and essayist Margaret Atwood. (00:01:21) I'm always happy to come to Minnesota because I know everybody here reads a lot. And anyway, don't don't don't laugh. Let me let me rearrange that a bit and I know that many people here rate a lot that better in any way we think of Minneapolis as Little Canada. And we think of Garrison Keillor as a Canadian who was stolen away in his youth by Gypsies and ended up here. So we do feel we have we have ties we feel that there are people here who understand the topics know and we did actually rent our firm and we were living in a farm on a farm in rural Ontario in the 70s. We rented it to a man from Iowa and we said, you know, it snows there and he said, oh, I'm from Iowa and I understand about snow and I said no, but really it actually really snows so, I don't know I'll be fine. So we went to Yes, we went to Edinburgh leaving him all alone on the farm. And when we got back, he was a nervous wreck. He said it snowed maybe he couldn't get his car up the driveway, but I think his real trauma was caused by the fact that he was having a midlife crisis and he had left his wife and he had never actually been into a grocery store for 15 years and not only did he not know what to buy but the prizes had all gone up a lot and when we got back we found an archaeological midden Heap. Just did you find on Ancient shores of clam shells we found an archaeological midden Heap composed of the shells of all the chicken pot Frozen Pies the him Then he had been eating all winter and that is all he had been eating and no wonder he had hallucinations. So what I'm really going to talk about this evening as I was for a topic somebody phoned me up and said what is your topic and well the topic that I presented over the phone was literary influences the raw shocking truth and the raw shocking truth that I intended to reveal about. The literary influences is that a lot of them aren't literary. So so that is what I will talk about and I will talk mostly about the literary influence is not all of which are literary on my most recent book The Blind assassin because I've been on the road with this book since the beginning of September and that is actually all I can remember In this book, you will find it showed you get past but page 15 that there are some three thousand year old women in this book who are still walking about and are appearing to be alive. Although they have not actually been alive for 3,000 years. You may think this is a fanciful detail, but it is based on personal experience. That woman is me after the book to her. That is what you are. So roughly the outline. First I would like to talk about structure or how the book has put together. Then I would like to talk about texture some of the contrasting kinds of writing in it. Then I will talk about two kinds of reading. I did as a child which have a bearing on this book namely cookbooks and trash then I won't say a word about one of my childhood experience with experiences which had a formative influence and that the biographers know nothing about yet. Then I will say a few words about one of the main motifs of this book, which is Blindness and finally I will conclude with a few words about the Bible and its connection with archaeology. That doesn't sound good. It's pretty good. So first of all structure the way the book is put together. The blind assassin is the story of virus Chase Griffin who is 82 years old and she's telling the story of her life and she Begins by saying that in 1945 her sister Laura drove a car off a bridge and then you go on and do find the beginning of a novel that was published two years after Laura's death a posthumous publication. And the title of this novel is the blind assassin So within this book called The Blind assassin, there is another book called The Blind assassin and within the other book called The Blind assassin. There's a story about a man and a woman who are having a clandestine Affair and in order to hold the woman's attention this man does what men often do under these circumstances. He tells tall tales. Unlike some men he does confess that this told held that he is telling his fiction and this is how he one of the ways in which he keeps her interested and the story that he tells her is also about a blind assassin So within this book called The Blind assassin, there's another book called The Blind assassin within the other book called The Blind assassin. There's a man telling a story about the blind assassin and now I'll tell you about the literary influence on the structure of this (00:07:44) book (00:07:47) literary influence on the structure of this book is the Old Dutch cleanser box. From the 1940s, which is I from when I remember it because it was my task when we were living in the cities in the colder months. It was my task to clean the bathroom. So I was very familiar with the Old Dutch cleanser package. And on the Old Dutch cleanser package. There was a Dutch woman in a long blue outfit and two big white hat who couldn't see her face and she was carrying a stick to chase the dirt with and in her other hand. She held another Old Dutch cleanser package and on the other Old Dutch cleanser package that she was holding. There is another Dutch woman in an outfit with the hat and his dick. Holding another Old Dutch cleanser package and on the other all Dutch cleanser baggage. There was another woman with a stick and of course, they got smaller and smaller, but you couldn't imagine them ever coming to an end. It was the first amazed en abyme that I ever this is a deconstructionist term. I just I can throw these things off, you know, I haven't actually taught in a university since 1972, but I keep up. It was the first amazed on a beam that I ever encountered is to drive me mad. So the other thing that you used to do in high school or at least I did the first time you encountered one of those three-way mirrors, you know the front and then the two sides you can stand and look in this one so that you can see the back of your head and then you can see an infinite number of yourselves receding into the distance. Don't do this too long. Somewhat more literary example, I'm always very fond of Henry James and I think the turn of the screw is a minor Masterpiece. But when you look at how its constructed it is a gathering of friends telling stories and within that Gathering of friends, one of the friends begins to tell the story of the turn of the screw and then he tells the story about the woman who is the center of the story and the woman tells her own story in a diary and also in ladders and within those that story that she is telling there is another story told to her by the housekeeper. So at the end you're not actually sure who is in charge of the story and who is telling the truth. Although they have all told the same story and so it is in the blind assassin all of these stories that I've told you sent her. And one Central event, so that's the real the literary literary influence. Texture texture refers to the mix of text in this book and there are several different kinds of writing in it. Iris tells her story but there are also newspaper clippings, which pertain to the events that she is relating and there are bits from society magazines. And then there is the blind assassin which is a novel which purports to have been written in the mid 40s. So it is in effect, a mix of different kinds of texts quite different kinds people who write for newspapers don't write the same kind of proses people who write literary novels and there are a couple of influences on this sort of mix of Textures in the book If you go back to early 20th century painting you will find that the Koenig East is to take pieces out of the newspaper and stick them onto canvas and then they would paint around them and they would paint over them. They would incorporate the newspaper into their paintings and then they would put a frame around it. So you had two kinds of representation enclosed within the frame you had the newspapers words, and then you had what the painter had done all around and each kind both commented on the other sort of representation and negated it That sounds pretty good, but really the real influence. Is when I was growing up in the 40s and when I was in public school television had just been invented hand had not penetrated hardly anybody had a television. And the first time I saw a television, I was pretty disappointed and it because the screen is only about this big and on the screen were these idiotic puppets and that was it so I didn't think it was very interesting radio is much more interesting at that time. But when you were sick and children were sick a lot more often then and you stayed home to entertain you you would be given a pile of old magazines some scissors some paste some crayons and a scrapbook and what you were supposed to do is cut the things out of the magazines that interested you and paste them. Into the Scrapbook and then you could draw all over them and put mustaches on them and things like that and I was always very interested in this activity. Of course what I mostly cut out was the ads because they had pictures and don't so they were completely surreal and incomprehensible or some of them were because in those days there were a lot of words and topics that you could not print so for instance ads referring to female products. You were never actually told what the thing was that was that was being advertised. They were very mystifying I remember a woman in a long Grecian style evening gown descending a flight of marble stairs with her hair blowing in the wind and in the background a beautiful blue Mediterranean Sea and the caption under this was mode s dot dot dot because as a child, of course you say because what I suppose it's questions like this that turned us into novelists, you know, because what that's really what what you ask when you start out to write a book. I was riveted by these kinds of ads as a child and as a result, I'm quite drawn to such things as old life magazines and I was looking at an old Life Magazine just recently and in it was an ad this was 1945. It was the earmuff issue Christmas 1945 and had a woman on the front with big furry earmuffs on earmuffs and just come in as a fashion thing then Maybe they'll be back. And this ad was an ad that showed a man sitting in front of a typewriter with a pipe and he was a writer. And he was being used to endorse pipe tobacco. I think because if you were a man in a writer then you had to have a pipe and I thought this must be the last time that a writer has ever been used to advertise. Anything must be the last time writing was considered sexy enough to be used by advertisers. So I said this to a young German person recently at the Frankfurt book fair. He said no no, no and Germany now there is in Young Writers to advertise all kinds of things. So just wait long enough everything comes back. So I was interested in ads and I was also deeply interested in the kinds of ads they had at the box of comic books, which I used to make fun of quite a lot. I'm afraid there are always things like your best friend won't tell you or always a bridesmaid never a bride and was always because you had some horrible because you smelled bad smells were the big thing in the 40s. They were they had come to come to the fore. She smells and germs were the items then I found that my my interest in these things was not really as downmarket as I have thought because Marshall mcluhan came out with the book was his first book and it was called the mechanical bride. This was when I was a college student. He had taken a number of advertisements and he had analyzed them. But he had cut them out and put them into his book without asking the permission of the companies and they took him to court and he had to withdraw the book from circulation, but he had a big stack of them in his Cellar and if you lived in Toronto and were a student at that time, you knew you can go to Marshall mcluhan seller and buy one under the counter and that is what I did. So I was very perked up by that. I was even more perked up to discover that in James Joyce's Ulysses. There's an ad it's for potted meat as you will recall. And as you made your way into my Virginia wolves mrs. Dalloway, if you get positive on page 2 you will come upon women the woman is walking along the street and she says some mysterious letters that appear in the sky and everyone is looking up at these mysterious letters and it is a man in an airplane. He was skywriting and what is he skywriting he Sky writing an ad for cream. Oh, so I was very pleased to discover this in really serious literature. And I'm put some ads in this book. You'll find them. Childhood reading. Well, I did read everything I can get my hands on including the box of cereal boxes in Canada. We were lucky to have half of that in French and gave me a deep interest in that language but among the things that caught my attention were cookbooks and I have to say that my mother was a tomboy and she was not very interested in any of the domestic Arts. She didn't cook but more or less absent-mindedly and she had no interest in clothing and no interest in house work. She was an athletic sort of person and I therefore was the sin seest wimpiest girliest person in my family. I was interested in things like knitting which she was not but I used to read these cookbooks which he had accumulated and she usually went through them for the really fast recipes that you can make that you can whip up. She was one of the phrase whipping up. But they to me were like messages from another planet and to I remember in particular one of them was by its era Fields blind and to this cookbook came out just at the turn of the 1920s going into the 30s right when the Depression was beginning and it had been commissioned by the Crisco company and therefore all of the things in it were made with Crisco. There wasn't any butter in it at all. And we as this cookbook when we were living in the North Woods in the warmer months. Because Chris go did not go off, you know, you can take and being vat of Crisco and it was before margarine was legal. Actually. We were in the north of Quebec. You don't laugh. I'm telling the truth. Everything I have said is the truth. Margarine was not legal in Quebec when we were there because the Dairy Farmers had lobbied and they had got it band but there was something called Mom's table spread which bore a surprising resemblance to margarine, but it was not called margarine and guess who owned it. The premier of Quebec at the time. Those were the good old days. Yes. Anyway, Chris comb Sarah Fields blind. I used to rain her with great attention because she told you how to run a genteel household even with limited resources. For instance. She told you how to run a household with a maid and she showed the made and in day costume and evening costume and then she showed you how to run a household and pretend that you did have a maid even when you didn't have one. This was just like Mars to me, but I was very interested in it. But the other one that held my attention was by Fannie Farmer and it was the Boston cooking school cookbook, and this was the staple it Before The Joy of Cooking which I then read as soon as I could get my hands on and I found out all kinds of things out of it. Let me tell you and indeed my first novel begins with a quote from the joy of cooking and I would like to share with you as they say in California, I would I would like to share with you the fact that a kind of cult has sprung up around this novel The edible woman and participants in this cult called make a cake in the shape of a woman and then they have their pictures taken standing around the cake and then they send the picture to me and eat the cake and Listen, this goes on all over the place. However, one of the reasons that I loved the Fannie Farmer cookbook was its blend of absolute rock hard New England practicality and the following kind of detail cookbook appears in a chapter in which dinner party is being given at short notice and the person who has to cook up the dinner party resorts to the Boston cooking school Cookbook by Fannie Merit firmer. And here is the description of it the cookbook had a plane cover a no-nonsense mustard color and inside it. They were plain doings as well. Fanny. Merit farmer was relentlessly pragmatic cut and dried in a tourist New England way. She assumed you knew nothing and started from there. A beverage is any drink? Water is the beverage provided for men by Nature. All beverages contain a large percentage of water and therefore their uses should be considered one to quench thirst. To to introduce water into the circulatory system three to regulate body temperature for to assist in carrying off water five to nourish. Six to stimulate the nervous system and various organs. seven for medicinal purposes and so forth taste and pleasure did not form part of her lists, but at the front of the book there was a curious epigraph by John Ruskin cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Cersei and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba, It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and bombs and spices and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and Groves and savory in Meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and Readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmother's and the science of the modern chemists. It means testing and no wasting it means English thoroughness and French and Arabian hospitality. And in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies. loaf givers I found it difficult to picture Helen of Troy in an apron. With her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her cheek dabbled with flour. And from what I knew about seriously and Madea the only things they'd ever cooked up were magic potions for poisoning heirs apparent or changing men into pigs as for the Queen of Sheba. I doubt she ever made so much as a piece of toast. I wondered where mr. Ruskin got his peculiar ideas about ladies and Coco Curry both still at was an image that must have appealed to a great many middle-class women of my grandmother's time. They were to be sedated and bearing unapproachable Regal even but possessed of Arcane and potentially lethal recipes and capable of inspiring the most incendiary passions in men and on top of that perfectly and always ladies loaf givers the Distributors of gracious largesse. At anyone ever taken this sort of thing. Seriously. My grandmother had all you needed to do is look at her portraits at that cat ate the canary smile those droopy eyelids. No, did she think she was the Queen of Sheba? without a doubt I was happy to be able to get Fannie Farmer into a cookbook and I do think that fifty years from now and people are considering our time. It is to Martha Stewart. They will look. To find out what women how women thought they ought to be living not how they actually lived. Nobody actually lives this way, but how they thought they perhaps ought to be (00:28:29) living. (00:28:32) So next kind of thing from childhood reading I called trash that I'll just take one kind of trash. I read every kind there was but I'll just concentrate on one kind which would be the science fiction and adventure story kind of trash that I used to read. I had a very kind young man recently say to me Miss Atwood. I would not have thought a person such as yourself would have been interested in literature such as that and I said, but I was not always a person such as (00:29:10) myself. (00:29:19) When I'm writing a novel I make a little birth chart for each of the characters. I make I put the years across the top. I put the months down the side and then I Mark the month and the year in which the person is born and that means that if you go across the chart in any given year, you know exactly how old that person is in which month and this saves a lot of time later. So I'll do that for myself. I was born in November of nineteen thirty-nine and that meant that I was able to read the boys own annual from about the turn of the century which was in my grandfather's attic and it also meant that after the war when I was of an age to appreciate them colored Comics came back. It was the Golden Age of Batman and Superman and Captain Marvel before a Superman took him to court. Did you know that I was so sorry. I quite liked captain. And all the Marvel family and in fact, you can have in one comment. You can have Junior marble Marvel who was Captain Marvel as a boy and Captain Marvel himself. That's magic. The reminds me of the place in Italy where one town claims to have John the Baptist's head and the next town over has John the Baptist had as a child. So you can get Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel as a child and you can also get Wonder Woman of him. I was deeply fond but my favorite of all was a person called Plastic Man and I liked him because he could squish himself into any sort of shape you might imagine and disguise himself as say a lamp or you know, a plate a compact. You never knew what he might be was all very surreal Flash. Gordon was big in those days and space was mysterious and magical topic for children. So I became interested in outer space in that way. And when I was in Grade 9 I joined a paperback book club and they sent us books that they thought would appeal to people of that age. And the first book that I got through the paperback book club was a book called Donovan's brain and in Donovan's brain Donovan and had a horrible accident, but his brain had been rescued. By some scientists who as always in such books. Didn't know what they were doing and then hooked up Donovan's brain and it's sort of a fish tank and they were feeding it and brain nutrients and their idea was that it would become a Super Brain it would become very wise but unfortunately Donovan had been mostly interested in stocks and shares while he was alive and in manipulating the world and that's what his brain continued to be interested in. He started in cornering the stock market inside his fish tank and the Brain got bigger and bigger and not only that it developed the ability to hypnotize anybody who came into the room and this is how it was able to Corner the stock market and people realize that it had to be stopped. But unfortunately, it could read your mind. So If you went into the room and tried to pull the plug, it would send out a jolt of electricity from itself, which would fry you to a crisp and I liked the solution to this book was a man the man who finally pulled the plug on Donovan's brain. Did it by memorizing French poetry. What a lovely touch and he recited this French poetry. I think it was very feminine or something like that short lines anyway, and he managed to keep this in mind the whole time. He was simulataneously going forward to pull the plug on Donovan and this confused Donovan because he didn't know any french and this is The value of knowing a second language. Well, so I read those kinds of books and it was the 50s and it was the Golden Age of being movies and I used to sneak off to these B movies and every once in a while. I find somebody else who was seen these movies, but they are not very numerous and they movies had titles such as the creeping eye which was from outer space. Of course. It was very large big guy big they didn't have very big budgets for these movies and the I was good until you saw that it was actually mounted on a tractor which Got into the shot a little too much and unliked love slaves of the Amazons. It was actually in color the Amazons captured men who strayed too far into the forest and they were wearing potato sacks dyed green there, which you can see their little under panties and bras and then captured these men and take them off and feed them hallucinatory substances and and engage in orgies with them, but the men got very very thin and realized they were going to be orgy to death unless (00:35:34) they (00:35:38) There's a it is a recurring theme in this kind of literature and they sorts of movies. I remember one involving spider women, but I won't go into the details was it was good not to get too fat amongst the spider women because one day a year. There were very good-looking. You didn't know they were spider women one day a year all the men were let out and they had to run very quickly and the spider women ran after them. And if they caught you they would sink their fangs into your neck and then lay eggs on you and this You learn a lot of things when you're exiting. Junkie literature. The there were some authors who have coursework Classics of the genre and I was very fond of them and I'll mention a few names for any of you who like the sort of thing John Wyndham Day of the Triffids the midwich Cuckoos. I think probably his vast very interesting short story called consider her ways HG Wells who invented a whole lot of plots that you see coming back again and again and things like Star Trek. I noticed the hollow man came around again this summer. That's a remake of the Invisible Man. Rider Haggard again and 2000 year old woman who isn't dead very good-looking. They always are usual Varon, of course did a lot of space travel and voyages underneath the ocean in defense of the genre. I will say that it has a long and respectable history that goes back at least to Herodotus and Plato the wonder story the travel story and the construction of alternate societies used to criticize your own proceeds through Utopia goes through Jonathan Swift's Gulliver truck Gulliver's Travels and in the 19th century, there was an outbreak of Utopias because everybody was designing better societies than didn't work out so much in the 20th century. We we tried a few and they usually involve a lot of Death so I think the search for Utopia. Has been more or less abandoned as a whole scale sort of thing these days you're much more likely to read things that are really adventure stories. I've I suppose I loved Ray Bradbury as a young person as well particularly the Martian Chronicles. Anyway, I can go on I can go on I could go on and on I can tell you the plots of tons of books, but I won't I'll go on to the next Motif blindness. This is the blind assassin and I suppose the formative experience in my life was realizing that I couldn't read the Blackboard when I was about 11 and then I would have to wear shock horror glasses. Oh how awful that was contact lenses had not been invented yet and I did spend many high school dances with men. I couldn't see. Vanity is a wonderful thing determines many human activities and I would never wear my glasses to high school dances. I can see their ears quite well when I got really close up I can say things because I was nearsighted. Anyway, I now have a range of about five different combinations of things that I can do. I can have contact lenses with reading glasses, which is what I've gone on right now. I can have bifocals without the contact lenses. I can have nothing at all. In which case I can read quite well up close. I can still thread needles. This is one of the advantages I can have sunglasses, which allow me to view the road and read the map at the same time. I have many different I constructions but it means that I've always been very conscious of vision and what you can see and his ease and how they see. The fact that people see differently, my mother isn't the moment almost blind. I thought that she would not want a copy of this book. She had copies of all the others because she could read them, but she didn't want one and she wanted it to be able to feel it because the letters on the covers are raised. So although she could no longer read what's on the cover. She can still feel what's on the cover. Anyway my assassin and this book is blind in the story within the story. There is a science fiction civilization that is arranged hierarchically and at the very bottom there are child slaves and some of these child slaves are used to weave carpets because children can see much better than have to look up. Us with their tiny little fingers to weave these beautiful carpets and people think I made this up and in fact, I found this information in the National Geographic and should you look on a www site called Holt uncensored you'll read a whole lot of connections with child labor now and the world today and the kinds of things it does to the children. Anyway, that's background in the foreground. There are the various kinds of blindness and vision that you can have you can have the third eye which is the eye of vision in our history. There's a contrast always between outer site and inward Vision. It's why Homer is depicted as having been a blind poet. We have a term for spiritual and moral blindness. And as Iris herself points out. There are two gods that are blind one is Justice and the other one is love and both of these Gods carry sharp edged weapons. What is it that makes you suspect that neither Justice nor love ever go really smoothly. That's a little bit about the blindness there's more but I'm not going to go through it Page by page now to my high-school formative experience. I usually talk about my grade 12 teacher his name was Miss Bessie Billings and grade 12 was the great in which I began to write and Miss Bessie Billings was very encouraging to me and she was a wonderful teacher. It was an age in which very smart women ended up teaching high school because universities wouldn't hire them. And this was beneficial to people such as myself though. It may not have been so beneficial for them because teaching High School is still make my idea of hell, but there was Miss Bessie Billings and grade 12, and she was the one who famously said when I showed her my first poem that must be very good dear because I can't understand it. At this time, I would like to talk about my grade 11 teacher. His name was mrs. Florence Smedley and I've always admired her because some years later when people went to make a documentary on me and interviewed Miss Lawrence medley, she said and usually teachers in this position say, oh, yeah. She was brilliant. I knew at once. She had such talent Miss Lawrence medley said there was nothing particularly outstanding about her. In my class and she was quite right. She told the truth that's admirable. There was nothing particularly outstanding about me in her class partly because she scared me so much. I was terrified the whole time. She had long white floating hair which he wore long white and floating and she was English and that was terrifying in itself. And she is to do the following thing. She has to recite the entire poem of Kubla Khan with her eyes closed. And when she would come to the end she is to whirl around slowly with her arms spread out and this impressed me deeply I've always been more of a choleric person than a Wordsworth person and I think you can divide people into two groups those who prefer college and those who prefer Wordsworth. Color Edge was quite a lot crazier now in Canada in the 40s and 50s. We had a very peculiar kind of public school system Arrangement because of the deal made with French Canada at Confederation. There were two kinds of school systems that you can have and when was the Catholic school system and one was the Protestant school system and both were publicly funded there was not the separation of church and state that there is in this country and the schools that I went to we're still considered part of the Protestant school system, which has been as I speak has become much less Protestant. And for that reason we all got the Bible every day. There was a Bible reading at the beginning of every school day. My parents were practicing agnostics. Remember what I said about my father being an entomologist. Well both during the warmer months and the colder months. He was he was quite worried that I might get into the clutches of churchy people and be brainwashed. And of course this made me very curious about all of this and I went off to all the churches I can go to and read the Bible from cover to cover and I certainly found some curious things in it that nobody ever paid much attention to and Sunday school. Although attention is more and more turning that way. There is a book called the Harlot by the side of the road that brings up almost all of the topics that I found. So so riveting in my youth It does not bring up the episode of the golden hemorrhoids, but that will come next. Somebody will get onto that anyway. Both the Romantic Poets and their interest in exotic and far off places and they stream of science fiction fantasy Adventure that I was talking about. There are both propelled by the rise of a new science in the 19th century. And that science was archaeology. If you can call it. Let's call it a Pursuit rather than a science and it was initially view old by the desire of people to discover the origins of the Bible. They wanted to find concrete evidence that these events had actually happened. So they went off looking for things like Noah's Ark and stuff like that and evidence that the Exodus from Egypt and actually taken place and they combed through the records of other civilizations looking to looking for references to biblical events, and then they branched. From and off looking for a Troy in The Iliad which indeed they found and they found quite a few things that people once thought were mythological but there was a great upsurge of of interest in new cultures and lost cultures in an attempt to find evidence for the Bible. and At the very beginning of the blind assassin when the man is telling the story to the woman. He says the place he's going to tell the story about is now just a desert but it used to have the civilization on it, which he is going to describe and he says that in the middle of a desert there's a big pile of stones and nobody knows what the real name for. It is it's called by various names one of the names for it is the Heap of rubble rubble and he then goes on to say that there are some other stories about this big pile of stones. There is a story that claims that the city wasn't really destroyed. It was it was shrunk very small and it was placed inside the pile of stones and everything that was ever going on and it is still going on and it now well if you look in the Bible and find the Battle of Jericho and then go on a bit, you will find the destruction of another city and the name of that other city is a aye aye and this word actually means heap of rubble. So that is the origin that is the literary influence on the beginning of this story because it seemed very curious to me that a place would be known by the name of its own destruction. It's real name has vanished The Only Name That Remains for it is the name of its own obliteration. It's a paradox. So those are my little topics but just consider one more thing. The story of the people being shrunk very small and put inside the the Heap of rubble of course is from the Arabian Nights people are always being drunk small and put in bottles and things in those stories. But in what other form can you find people shrunk very small and carrying on their lives without realizing that their dad. And what other form well? Every book that you have ever read is exactly like that. (00:51:14) That was writer poet and essayist Margaret Atwood speaking last fall at the library Foundation of Hennepin County's penpals lecture Series held at the adata Shirin congregation in Minnetonka Margaret Atwood is the author of several books including the handmaid's tale the robber bride or latest novel The Blind assassin won the booker prize, which is Britain's highest literary honor. Now, if you missed part of Margaret Edward speech we're going to be rebroadcast the is program at nine o'clock tonight. Also, we should call your attention to our website. You'll be able to hear the speech again on our website plus Margaret Atwood when she was at the pen pals lecture series also took lots of questions from the audience. We don't have time to broadcast that Q&A session today, but you can hear it on our website and there's an interview with her as well. So check it out, Minnesota Public Radio. Dot-org just a reminder that broadcast of the pen pals lecture series is supported by the bookcase on Lake Street in Wayzata announcing a book signing, February 8th at 7 o'clock with Ella In Bloom author Shelby Heron online at bookcase of Wayzata.com. And while we're at it also a reminder that Minnesota Public Radio is member supported if you've recently sent in your membership renewal we do thank you. What does it for our midday program today? I'm Gary eichten glad you could join us and we hope you'll be able to tune in tomorrow when we talk about.